More TK

A sharp look at AI’s trillion-dollar boom through exocapitalism, where data centers become financial instruments, and the future of software hangs in the balance.
 
​Roberto Alonso Trillo is a Hong Kong–based theorist and artist whose work examines deep learning systems as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructures, situating technical practice within contemporary political theory.
 
Marek Poliks is a theoretical researcher in deep learning and AI. Marek's work is primarily concerned with the autonomy and self-organizing character of technical infrastructure. He is based in Minneapolis.
 
Dena Yago is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (2010-2016). Recent exhibitions include The Intermission, Pireaus (2024), and MoMA, New York (2024). Her writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Flash Art, and frieze magazine. Her forthcoming book of selected writings, That Figures, will be published by After 8 Books this May.

Any educator will tell you that it’s been a weird time to be in the classroom since LLMs came about—but teachers of creative technology have had a particularly disorienting experience. On the one hand, we embrace new tools and our ability to critique and experiment with them. On the other, these same tools are radically altering what it means to learn, to teach or even be in the classroom at all. What does it mean to teach creative tech when the tech we’re engaging with is reshaping creativity in real time? 
A discussion led by Lai Yi Ohlsen with panelists Taehee Yoonseul, Carrie Sija Wang, Tommy Martinez & Nancy Dayanne Valladares. Recorded on February 17, 2026 at Index Chinatown, NYC.
Presented by Index & garden3d TK.

In this episode of More TK, Hugh Francis brings “Where the Flower Grows” to life in a hypnotic reading. Over the past several months, he's been exploring a different kind of future with USB Club. They’ve been sketching out a philosophy for small, air-gapped machines we call local LLMs. Instead of cloud dependence, they’ve been testing what happens when intelligence runs on hardware you can hold, open, and trust.
Read the full article on Substack.
Follow along and join the conversation at @garden3d_net.

Elie, Hugh and Sam sit down with Michael Adams from CivLab to discuss his efforts to democratize San Francisco’s 4,000-page government charter. Our convo spans across Michael’s background in the space industry to CivLab’s purpose: Preventing the collapse of self-governing civilization.

In this episode of More TK, Elie Andersen (@elieilelie) brings “The Mets Are the Last Thing I Believe In” to life in an intimate reading. It’s a reflection on fandom and faith, on what it means to belong to a city through its symbols, from blue and orange caps to the ferries, delis, and sidewalks that define New York.
Read the full article on Substack here.
Follow along and join the conversation at @garden3d_net.
 

In this episode of More TK, Sam Taylor (@tohumankind) brings Survival Theater to life in a dramatized reading. Set in a Love Island villa, it explores culture, labor, and the performances we all take on to survive, from reality TV to LinkedIn, from layoffs to collective experiments in art and work.
Read the full article on Substack here.
Follow along and join the conversation at @garden3d_net.

We’ve been here before. Plato worried writing would ruin memory. Now professors worry AI will ruin thinking. But maybe outsourcing cognition has always been part of being human.In his new essay, @_hhff moves from Hinge date debates about David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, through ancient philosophy and cognitive science, to the possibility of a planetary brain. It asks: is AI the end of human thought, or simply its next extension?“The internet we know today has been for the most part a passive harness; requiring individual humans “crank the handle”.As the bandwidth and interconnectivity of our discrete conscious minds are faster linked, the internet may start to resemble an active “exocortex”, functioning like a coherent super-organism, capable of wise, compassionate action on a massively global scale. Human minds, as nodes in the system, would be brought to face their own own acute suffering and harm, finally allowing us to feel it all as a personal wound, and overcome our fragmented, short-sighted self-interest.The more entangled our humanity becomes with its own digital reflection, the more a vision of social justice not enforced by law, but naturally arising from shared experience may come.”Read the full article here.